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How do UMAi Dry® casings help you craft

slow fermented traditional dry sausage — and how can we do better?

This is what we asked in our December survey. Almost 450 UMAi Dry® sausage makers responded!

Your responses set us on a clear course to formulate our new UMAi Dry® Sausage Spice Blends so that you can craft the best tasting salumi recipes ever with UMAi Dry® casings. These blends were created by the master dry sausage maker at Spark Spices. You will find spice blends for soppressata, pepperoni and salami available our website on February 1, 2016.

Even more important, we learned a TONS from your answers to the question:

“What do you like best about UMAi Dry® casings?”

We imagined you might like the strength, ease and no fuss nature of UMAi Dry® casings, but we heard again and again how you love recreating old family recipes and (most important of all) needing no special curing or drying chamber.

157 customers told us that like the EASE of UMAi Dry® casings

134 customers told us they use UMAi Dry® casings because they are NO FUSS

85 customers noted that the STRENGTH of UMAi Dry® casings stood out for them

28 customers love RECREATING OLD RECIPES WITHOUT FEAR

Here are a few of the great comments and stories:

“First, I love the ease of use and clear and concise instructions. Money well spent there. Then, I like the strength and use of zip-ties on a near indestructible bag.”

“The ease of use has been wonderful, they are consistently strong and do not rupture during stuffing. Their shelf life is excellent and the ability to make smaller batches that with natural casings has been a plus.”

“Using without fear, humidity levels, being able to create safely under normal refrigeration conditions. I think the products are a great idea!”

“I personally like the fact that I can recreate traditional recipes any time of the year without having to limit my production to the fall.”

“The product takes the guesswork out of drying out meat. I don’t have to worry about humidity as much and the product is always sterile so I don’t have to worry my brother flushed it out properly. :-)”

“No fear is a big one, my schedule at home is erratic at best and my wife is a conscientious objector so for me the big one is once the casing is stuffed I can leave it in the refrigerator until the weight is right with no intervention on my side…good for me. BTW, I love the product and will be buying more.”

“The best ever, salami in your own fridge fridge, most of my friends don’t think you can make your own, I don’t have to worry about bacteria etc, it is a great idea and it absolutely works. I made five Soppressata and they were eaten very quickly.”

“Umai Dry is great. Finally you guys made something so someone can make salumi without building a fermentation chamber. Love Umai dry. Keep up the great work.”

“My dad is 80, born in Italy & taught me how to make a simple traditional sopressata & sausage dried in basements with the right environment. Everyone loves it. We also make Copacolla & it’s too much for him to breakdown the butt. His butcher will do it for him now & he gets the joy of watching it in his fridge anytime of year.”

“The ease of use. Especially with the zip ties being all you need to seal. Also living in the south it an almost impossible climate to use traditional casings so this makes a very distant dream a home kitchen reality. ”

Thanks to all the kind folks who took time to respond to the survey and share their thoughts and stories.

We feel really encouraged and inspired to continue building our business on the hope we help you CREATE TRADITION AT HOME®!

As you know, UMAi Dry® makes it possible to dry age and dry cure in your home refrigerator. In our never-ending quest to make it easier for you to “create tradition at home,” we are always exploring new techniques for applying UMAi Dry®.

With the release of our new 32mm UMAi Dry Sausage Casing for quick drying fermented recipes such as pepperoni, saucisson sec and snack sticks, we discovered a great solution for tying off the casings.

Traditionally to tie off sausage stuffed into natural or collagen casing, you need butcher’s twine and really strong fingers. A long sausage making session, tying and tying and tying off sausage after sausage can not only leave you with sore fingers, but also with splits with the butchers’ twine starts to cut into your skin. The twine had to be tight or the sausage hung to ferment and dry might–PLOP–fall to the floor putting all your hard work to waste.

When UMAi Dry® casing was first released, we recommended measuring off lengths of casing, then sealing them with a vacuum sealer, as we do with most UMAi Dry® applications. After stuffing, however, sealing the end using the VacMouse® to draw out the tiny bit of air at the end of the casing seemed fiddly and wasteful. Moreover, you still need the hang the sausage to dry, so the strong fingers and butcher’s twine were still required.

During testing various alternatives, we discovered the common zip ties (aka tie wrap or cable ties) were a far more efficient and far less strenuous way to tie off the casings. A simple 4″ cable tie does a great job of tying off the starting end after you thread your preferred length of casing onto the stuffing horn. It is a clean secure way to tie off the end of each sausage as you stuff it out.

The best discovery was a technique that eliminates the need for any butcher’s twine. When stuffing, if you stuff two links, with a small space of casing in between, you can then easily hang the pair of links for fermentation.

Here are the steps:

Zip tie the starting end.

Stuff out one link.

Twist the end of that stuffing and zip tie it off.

Leave about an inch or two centimeters of casing, then zip tie the starting point for the second link

Stuff out the second link, twist off, zip tie.

Leave another short span of casing and zip tie for the starting point of your next link of sausage.

Cut between the ending point and starting point leaving two sausage links together.

Hang the pair from the connecting point to ferment.

The photos below will give you a good idea how this works both while stuffing and when hanging to ferment.

We hope this helpful hint makes it even easier for you to experiment with fermented dry sausage making.

Pepperoni is an American dry sausage introduced by italian immigrants in the beginning of the 20th century. It is a cousin of several traditional italian salami products like: Soppressata, Salami Toscano, etc.

Today the popularity of this sausage exceeds any other dry sausage, since pepperoni is the most popular pizza topping around the world. However, the pepperoni that is put on your Domino’s pizza is produced in large factories using very inexpensive ingredients and is cooked prior to drying. It has little to do with its origins as an artisanal dry sausage. We went on a quest to make pepperoni the way it was originally made. Stanley Marianski in his book “The Art of Making Fermented Sausages” had the recipe we were looking for.

This simple and delicious artisan dry sausage can be made with the new UMAi Dry 32 mm Dry Sausage Kit right in the comfort of your kitchen.

Here is the process and recipe:

We used lean pork tenderloin since it is very affordable at our local Costco warehouse (you can use any leaner cut of pork), we also used beef chuck and pork back fat.

You would want to par-freeze all the meat in thin strips before making the sausage. Once the meat is semi-frozen, you can cut it into small cubes in order to feed them into the grinder:

After the meat is cubed you can put it back in the freezer and assemble you cure and spices:

Now we are ready to grind the meat, we like to use a large 6mm (1/4 in.) grinding plate, it makes the texture and drying more even. When grinding the meat you would want to alternate beef, pork and fat to get some mixing in the grinding step:

After all the meat is ground, the cure and spices can be added. We use wooden paddles to mix the cure and spices in since the ground meat is cold and mixes very easily. Warming up the meat with hands makes mixing the cure more difficult.

After the spices and the cure are mixed in we will add the Bactoferm T-SPX starter cuture, which has been previously dissolved in previously boiled and cooled to room temperature water. After the culture has been added we begin to “knead” the sausage mix with hands until begins to stiffen:

We thne put the mixture back into the freezer and get our stuffer ready and prepare the UMAi Dry 32mm casing included in the sausage kit. We will use 4 inch zip-ties to close the ends of sausage chubs:

We stuffed the chilled sausage mix into pair chubs, trying to avoid air pockets. The pair chubs will make it easier to hand the sausage for fermentation:

We used an unused oven as our fermentation chamber. The oven was at room temperature 65-75F. We fermented for 36 hours. The pepperoni sausage will change color from pale orange to bright red after fermentation:

After fermentation the pepperoni is ready for drying. UMAi Dry allows you to dry in any modern household fridge on a wire rack. Don’t use a beer fridge, mini-fridge or garage fridge in the winter. We used our regular kitchen fridge to dry:

The 32 mm UMAi Dry sausage casing dries pretty quickly. In this case it took only 2 weeks for the sausage to loose the 35-40% weight required for dry sausage

This pepperoni exceeded our expectations. The flavor and texture was levels above commercially produced pepperoni. It had a true artisanal character.

To make good looking and good tasting dry sausage with UMAi Dry is not that hard. There a few basic practices to follow to ensure you get the very best results for your effort and patience.

Here are a few helpful tips:

1. Keep the meat cold: Slice the meat into thick slices (+/- ¾ in./1 cm) and partially freeze prior to cutting them into cubes for grinding. Keep the meat as cold as possible through each step of the process right until it is stuffed into UMAi Dry® casing. Keeping the meat cold (aka icy, nearly frozen) makes grinding and mixing easy as can be. Frozen meat grinds out with much better definition. The ground meat will keep its shape. The defined grind will also allow the spices and cure to distribute more easily and evenly, coating each individual particle. Finally. stuffing a cold sausage mixture guarantees an well-defined appearance to the finished dry sausage, achieving a classic salumi look.

2. Grind large: Use a large hole plate when grinding the meat for dry sausage. Larger meat particles will allow faster, more even drying. It will also give the sausage the classic texture of a fine salami. Smaller grind will take longer to dry and create a less defined texture.

3. Use paddles or other tools to mix cure and spices into the ground meat : If you use hands, you end up with frozen digits and sticky meat, making even mixing next to impossible. Wood, plastic or metal paddles will help keep the ground meat cold and help coat each particle with cure and spices for an even mix. Once the spices and cure coat the sausage particles well, you can use hands to knead the mixture until it gets stiff, indicating a stable mixture.

4. Use a dedicated stuffer to stuff the casing: This is a lesson we’ve learned the hard way. Hand grinders and grinder stuffer attachments will generally result paste like or doughy re-ground meat–very undesirable for a classic dry sausage. A dedicated stuffer will work more gently, preserving the structure of the meat. The result is the well-defined particle pattern of classic salami.

5. Ferment the sausage in a protected space with little air flow: Fermentation is one of the most critical steps in making dry sausage. During this step the sausage should be prevented from drying. Fermenting sausages should be placed in an area with little to no air movement. Rapid airflow can dry out the outside of the sausage preventing the outer surface from properly fermenting. As a result you may have uneven drying and poor appearance of the finished product. We’ve begun to use an oven or similar enclosed space. One sausage maker showed us how he rigged up a paper grocery bag umbrella-style to shelter the batch of sausages he hung to ferment.

These are practices we’ve found helpful in our pursuit of making better and better dry sausage. We hope they help you get the best results for all the time, effort and patience you will put into mastering the art of salumi!

Some basic practices that make a huge difference in texture and flavor of the finished dry sausage:

These basic practices start in the actual preparation of the meat in the very beginning and have a huge impact on the quality of the finished product almost two months later. We would like to go over these basic practices and their impact:

1.Start with cold meat and keep it cold throughout the process: This is probably the most important of all factors and affects the texture and drying of the product. In principal the temperature of the meat being ground, mixed with the cure and the stuffed into the casing determines the way the meat binds together and forms the finished sausage. The proteins in the meat need to be extracted to bind the sausage together and give it the grain and texture of dry sausage.

Grinding temperature: If the meat is too warm during grinding, the grinder will not make sharp cuts, but rather “mash” the meat giving a bologna texture, rather than firm kernels of dry salami. The meat should be preferably close to frozen during grinding to yield well defined particles.

Mixing temperature:If the meat is too warm during mixing of the cure and starter culture, the particles can get “mashed”, fat can melt and coat the lean particles not allowing them to bind together properly. Causing a crumbly dry texture of the finished sausage. The meat should be close to frozen during mixing of the cure and starter culture.

Stuffing temperature:During stuffing it is important to keep the meat chilled in order not to melt the fat or mash the particles for the two reasons stated above. The particles of meat entering the casing during stuffing are going to be positioned in there for drying and will determine the texture and drying pattern. The meat should be close to frozen during stuffing. It is advisable to chill the body of the stuffer or some of its components to keep the meat as cold as possible.

2.Grinding plate size: The size of the grinding plate determines the texture and drying pattern of the finished sausage. The larger grind results in more even and faster drying. If we bite into a bologna or a hot dog, we can not see the particles nor do we get any distinct texture of the meat that was used to make the product. Bologna starts out as a creamy paste or sometimes a liquid that is then cooked to a solid. A dry cured sausage like a dry salami is not cooked, so the particles of meat retain their character and texture.

During drying the moisture from inside the sausage has an easier time migrating through a larger particle maze than a tighter small particle maze thereby drying more evenly.

3.Fermentation humidity level: The stuffed sausage should be placed in a space that is relatively humid or at least does not have any direct airflow blowing on the fermenting chubs. This will ensure a more even drying pattern.

After the soon to become dry sausage is stuffed, it needs to ferment, so it can develop that distinct and prized salami flavor. During fermentation, the mixed in starter culture will multiply and ferment the meat lowering its PH level and giving it a tangy flavor. Starter culture needs moisture to work. If the outside of the sausage begins to dry too quickly during fermentation, the starter culture will not be able to ferment the meat that is on the outside of the chub and the result will be an uneven drying pattern and a hard rind on the outside.

Fall in Minnesota (as is the case in most of Northern US) is always accompanied by the sights and sounds of Canada geese. They are often described as nuisance by urban residents because of their brazen disregard for the presence of humans, cars or buildings. These large, unattractive looking birds are perfectly legal to hunt in Minnesota and are becoming more and more popular with local hunters.

Many hunters often wonder how to use the goose meat. We found this nutritional information regarding wild game useful: http://www.gunnersden.com/index.htm.hunting-game-nutrition-value.html

Our customer Glenn sent us some pictures where he incorporated goose meat into a great salami soppressata and chorizo recipe using UMAi Dry:

Pictures below shows Soppressata, tags show the date and starting weight, finished weight on the back side of tag

5 lbs of Soprestatta and 5 kbs of Chorizo both made from ground 3.5 lbs of goose and 1.5 lbs of pork.

Day 1

Fermenting

Dry curing

Finished Soprestatta, very nice texture and flavor, casings worked out great.

We think Glenn’s idea is a pretty ingenious way to utilize the meat of a bird that many in the US consider to be unattractive.